Business

Inkling's E-Books Put the Consumer in Charge

The invention of the Kindle, we're still consuming flat text files on devices capable of so much more.

Inkling, a digital publishing company founded by Apple alum Matt MacInnis in 2009, hopes to fulfill the early promises of e-readers by creating beautiful, interactive editions of reference titles with its software, Inkling Habitat.

While Amazon and other competitors have taken the traditional book and converted it to a digital format, Inkling is breaking away from the standard text file to create something more usable: interactive decks of cards covered with text, photos and video. With hundreds of titles already available for purchase for Apple devices, Inkling is launching the publishing industry into the digital age.

Inkling Habitat, a cloud-based, collaborative digital publishing software, is the cornerstone of the Inkling model, and has allowed the company to reimagine the definition of "e-book."

With Habitat, teams collaboratively create content for any Apple device. Editors convert text and images from the original printed version of the book into digestible chunks of information, which designers and developers then format into beautiful "cards." All of this is accomplished within Habitat, a software at once as powerful as an Adobe Suite tool like InDesign and as collaborative as Google Docs. In theory, the entire team can work seamlessly and simultaneously to build a book from start to finish, commenting on each other's work and contributing ideas right within the software.

Once created, all of Inkling's content indexes and becomes searchable in Google. Just type a topic followed by "Inkling" as a Google query; the first link will show the available Inkling texts on subjects ranging from digital cameras to The Modernist Cuisine to dog training. Habitat has become so useful that some of the largest publishers in the world, such as Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Elsevier, formed partnerships with Inkling to create interactive versions of their own reference titles.

While Amazon corners the market of e-book distribution for titles like Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl and other bestsellers, Inkling is looking to the remainder — and more sizable portion — of the e-book market: reference texts. MacInnis says Inkling re-conceptualizes the book as a carrier of information.

"The things that were printed in books for the last hundred years are just a massive array of different use cases," MacInnis says. "If you really zoom out, you can look at magazines and pornography and you can look at novels and business books, and it's actually remarkable that a single device, a bunch of pieces of thinly mashed out wood pulp, strung together by glue, that that stuff was able to serve so many different kinds of use cases."

Reference content, however, can sometimes fall on the untrustworthy spectrum, depending who's authoring and hosting it (see: many Wikipedia entries). Don't forget the authoritative yet tedious content, like subscription databases or textbooks. Inkling is attempting to transform reference content into something both trustworthy and dynamic. Consumers can even purchase cards by chapter, much like one would select a song from an album.

"[The Kindle] took the simplest, easiest kind of content, which was just text, and they scaled [it] onto a digital device and made it really easy to read the text in order. And they're a really elegant solution for that. We solve for a completely different use case," MacInnis says.

In fact, MacInnis doesn't even consider Amazon, the largest e-book distributor in the world, to be a competitor, saying, "We just are not dealing with the same end user use cases, and we don't have overlapping technologies [or] approaches to the market. People only ask that question when they've conflated 'e-book' with everything the publishing industry has done to date."

So what does this mean for the consumer? For starters it could translate to a more expensive e-textbook. The Inkling version of the popular Campbell biology textbook is almost $30 more than the standard e-book version for Kindle. Thrifty students aren't likely to shell out additional money even for a better product. Even books like the For Dummies series can cost an additional $8 more for Inkling. In an industry where Amazon has trained consumers to expect an e-book for $9.99, higher prices can mean failure for a budding startup like Inkling.

Some consumers don't seem to mind the raised prices. Catherine McGee, a graduate student at NYU, has bought several cookbooks and a textbook from Inkling. She raves about the products.

"I wholeheartedly believe the Inkling platform is where textbook publishing is going," she says. "The enhanced and interactive features like photographs, videos, quizzes and the ability to share notes with other Inkling readers are integrated into the books in a way that regular (e-pub) ebooks are not capable of."

Another issue? Compatibility across devices. Inkling's interactive texts are available only through Apple's iPad, iPhone and Mac. This is likely due to the difficulty that comes with developing for a variety of devices. But if Inkling's interactive card model catches on, it's a difficulty the whole publishing industry will have to navigate, making the prices of all e-books rise as the cost to produce them increases.

Inkling's toughest challenge, however, will be re-establishing what it means to be an e-book. Creating a whole new model for how we consume text is no easy task, particularly in a slow moving industry like publishing. The hordes of paper book devotees (and publishers) hesitant to make the switch to digital undermine the entire model of a company like Inkling. But while the major publishing houses stay rooted in the traditions of the last hundred years, their business models slowly crumble to pieces.

It may be up to small startups, like Inkling, to right the whole industry back on track.

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